Talking to Strange Men (19 page)

A customer was standing meekly beside him holding up a handful of seed packets. John apologized and hastened to answer the stream of questions put to him about seeds which the packet said would grow into a banana passion flower.

‘Ha ha ha, damn!' shouted the mynah bird.

In the pottery shop, which was dim and cavernous inside and smelt of clay, Mark bought two large earthenware jars ornamented with flowers and swags and silenus faces and John, though he had not meant to, found himself buying a lamp with a heavy bulbous base glazed in grey and coffee brown. In the back of his mind was a half-formed idea of arranging that meeting in his house and of making the place look more attractive before this happened. The chair covers had come back from the cleaner's and the curtains were up. Why not splash out a bit and buy those two jugs to match the lamp and a couple of flower pots too that he could put geraniums in . . .?

‘You were the one who didn't care about coming,' said Mark, ‘and you've bought more than I have.'

He seemed particularly nervous today. John hadn't been able to relax in the car. Mark had overtaken a truck as they were coming out of Ruxeter and for a terrible few seconds John hadn't thought they were going to make it. Sweating,
his mouth stretched into a gargoyle grimace, Mark had pulled in just in time to avoid an oncoming removal van. But he drove back to the city in an apparently calmer frame of mind, talking to John in a very ordinary rational sort of way about what plants to put in the new pots and even asking his advice. Only when John explained to him that Trowbridge's would be closed now, that this was the one afternoon of the week that they closed, did he begin grumbling again, asking what the country was coming to, how could Britain expect economic stability when shops still kept to that ridiculous old-fashioned early closing system?

A newly-opened Indian restaurant called the Hill Station in Alexandra Road was suggested as a desirable place to eat. Mark wanted to go into a pub first and parked the car on a meter in Collingbourne Road. Fontaine Park was a mass of greenery, its lawns scarcely visible between the beeches and sycamores. Since John had penetrated the condemned house all the trees had come into leaf and it was scarcely possible any longer to see its rear windows from here. He looked curiously at the front of the house as they passed it but its boarded-up ground-floor windows and metal-sealed front door gave nothing away. Suppose, when he looked up, he had seen a face at a first- or second-floor window? The face perhaps of the very tall young man who had come that evening to the cats' green drop? John was not at all sure he would know that face again. Perhaps it had been the man called Chambers.

Mark pushed open the saloon-bar door of the Gander. It was the kind of pub John most disliked, an inner city pub of Edwardian origin with a lot of stained glass, ornate but dirty ceilings, marble tables, apathetic barmaids and strident clientele. A strong smell of beer met him on a hot wave.

Mark said, ‘O God, we forgot to buy any wine for later.'

John would have been happy to go on forgetting, though he knew that when the wine was there he would drink it. It wasn't yet five-thirty with half an hour to go before the wineshop in Ruxeter Road would close. John was given a half-pint of lager and settled at a corner table while Mark went off in quest of cheap Riesling. All the time they had been out Mark hadn't once mentioned Cherry and John was
glad of it. He felt that Mark had a very different picture of Cherry in his memory from the one that he personally cherished and he was made to feel uneasy when they came into conflict. Mark seemed to remember her as some sort of beautiful goddess, a fatal woman, while to him she was the little sister he had first realized was ugly when she was eleven years old.

But without Cherry, or Mark's marriage, which was another favourite subject he hadn't touched on, what on earth would they have to talk about? The empty evening seemed to yawn before him. It would end perhaps in silent moody drunkenness. An idea came suddenly to him. Why not ring up Colin and get him to join them? If only, between the three of them, they knew some women! But John didn't really want to know any women except Jennifer. He had a notion that a married man shouldn't really know other women, except as casual acquaintances.

Mark took the suggestion about Colin with his old belligerence.

‘I'm boring, I suppose?'

He drank nothing but beer during the meal. Wine, John had often reflected, doesn't seem to go with spices and curries. It had been somehow taken for granted that they would end the evening at Mark's flat, though this would mean John's taking a taxi home unless Mark were still sober enough to drive him. Silence prevailed while they were eating and John was able to relax a little. It was still broad daylight and the evening had become much warmer with one of those unheralded rises in temperature that sometimes occurred at about this time of day in late spring. Mark said as he started the car:

‘Do you know what day tomorrow is?'

‘It's May the twenty-second.'

‘It's Cherry's birthday,' Mark said. ‘She would have been thirty-five.'

John felt a sinking of the heart. Not because he had forgotten Cherry's birthday, he would have remembered it next day, and it wasn't important anyway, remembering her birthday. But he sensed that Mark had used this ploy to
bring the conversation back to her or, rather, to resume where they had left off last Monday.

‘She might have had teenage children by now,' Mark said.

He was driving up the steep road that skirted Hartlands Gardens, the terraces of which, hung with blossoming trees and others in full fresh leaf, fell away to the house in its parkland and to the city below, its spires and towers and grey slate roofs, the curling river, the green everywhere among the brick and stone. The sky, now the sun had gone, was melon-coloured, a very pale red-gold.

Suddenly Mark began speaking rapidly, a high-voiced gabble. ‘The first time I ever came to your home, to your parents' house, I thought it was wonderful, I'd never known anywhere like it. Everybody was so nice to everyone else, polite and kind and sort of praising everyone. I'd had a rotten childhood. My parents never spoke to each other unless they had to. I never heard them say anything pleasant to each other, not ever. My father was always telling me horrible things about my mother behind her back, how hopeless she was and stupid and how he had married her when he was too young to know any better. And my mother used to tell me he'd ruined her life and hint at appalling sorts of sexual mistreatment. I went away to college and never went back, I just lived in furnished rooms after that. I'd never known what a real home was till I met Cherry and she took me to Geneva Road. Do you know one of the first things that happened when I got there? Your father came home from work. He put his arm round your mother and said, “How's my sweetheart?” I've never forgotten that. I never will. I thought, one day I'll marry Cherry and we'll be like that. We'll still be like that when we're old.'

‘We were an exceptionally happy family. All that changed, of course.'

Mark took no notice. ‘Your father asked Cherry's opinion of something. He asked her what she thought. It was some international thing, something out of the paper, not women's stuff. I couldn't believe it. And she answered him very intelligently but it was the way she answered I'll never forget. He was sitting down and she laid her hand on his shoulder and her cheek against his hair. She called him Daddy. She was
eighteeen but she still said Daddy. I thought she was lovely. I was breathless and sort of frightened because I thought she was too good for the likes of me and I might so easily lose her.'

Mark threw back his head and broke into a horrible kind of staccato laughter, cold and humourless and self-mocking. He banged his foot on the accelerator and the car shot into the Fonthill Court car park, juddering and squeaking to a halt.

Mark opened the first bottle before he had even sat down. He went straight into the kitchen with it. John sat in the window looking at the clear sky whose colour was now a greenish gold, already punctured by a few bright winking stars. It gave him a strange feeling sitting there, so exposed, so out on a perch, as if he might suddenly be precipitated off the edge. In the gardens below the thickening foliage was a deep, dense and mysterious green. The flickering tower pointed up to the stars, to the transparent slice of moon.

John didn't know why, he was sure there was no cause for it, but he had a sense of panic, as of something awful being about to happen. In that moment – for there was a precise moment at which he became aware of this feeling – he knew that he ought to get up and go. He ought to go out and find Mark, tell him he felt ill or had remembered some appointment, run out into the street and find a taxi or walk down and get the bus. Mark would be offended and might never speak to him again but what would that really matter? John knew his being there wouldn't really save Mark from having a breakdown if such a thing was imminent. And he desperately wanted to go. If that window had opened on to a lawn, would he have stepped out quietly and vanished without a word to Mark?

Convention held him back. Mark had said he was ruled by convention and it was true. Abruptly to leave someone who was opening a bottle of wine for the two of you to share was something he couldn't do. It must be surely that he would prefer to face whatever was coming to him than provoke a scene with Mark or have to stand up to him. But nothing was coming to him, it was all nonsense, all imagination . . .

Mark walked in with the bottle on a tray and two glasses already filled. The dishes of nuts and crisps John served were never provided here. John put out his hand for the glass with a sense that it was too late now. Whatever was going to happen would happen.

Mark said, ‘D'you want a light on?'

The sky was so glowing still, the city such a bright galaxy of lights, that John had scarcely noticed how dim it had grown indoors. He looked into the shadows of the room, then up at Mark. It was a distorted face that he saw, its expression that same staring look of horror.

‘I suppose so,' John said. ‘It will be dark soon.'

Mark drank his glass of wine at what seemed to be one swallow. He immediately refilled the glass, his hand trembling, slopping the wine.

‘I don't want lights,' he said in a fierce belligerent way. ‘I want the dark. You'll have to sit in the dark whether you like it or not.'

John shrugged. ‘OK.' The wine was sharp. He was aware of its cold passage down through his chest and of a tremor of nausea. ‘Look at that sky,' he said. He had to say something. ‘Look at that wonderful clear colour. It's going to be a fine day tomorrow.'

‘It's going to be a fine day tomorrow,' Mark mocked him. He was still standing. He was standing over John. ‘It's enough to make anyone puke the way you go on. Clichés and small talk. You're programmed, did you know that? You're a floppy disk the Great Computer Programmer has put a file of words and phrases on. Two hundred for average daily use. That's a good name for you, floppy disk. I think I'll call you that. It implies feebleness and learned responses in the right proportions. Christ, no wonder that wife of yours left you. What did you say to her every night before you went to bed, floppy? “It's going to be a fine day tomorrow. Me for Bedford. Up the wooden hill”?'

John knew that he hadn't blushed but had turned very pale. Mark was still standing there, shaking all over now. And suddenly, to John's horror, he fell on his knees. He fell on his knees at John's feet and lifting up his face, holding up his hands, muttered at first incoherently, then all, too
articulately, that he was sorry, that he didn't know what had come over him, that he was a bastard.

‘I don't know why I say these things. I take it all out on you. I can't go on like this, behaving like this. I'll crack if I don't tell you. It's been weeks since I've known I've got to tell you, that's why I got in touch in the first place, but I'm a coward, I couldn't do it. So I insult you instead. Say you forgive me.'

An inkling of his own value, that he too had his rights, that he shouldn't be Mark's punching bag, held John back. He wouldn't say it. Why should he, after the things Mark had said? Mark had attacked him without provocation in his most vulnerable part. Instead he said:

‘What is this you've got to tell me?'

‘Please forgive me, John. Later on you won't be able to forgive me.'

‘Get up,' John said. ‘Don't kneel there.'

Mark slid back across the floor. He sat on the floor with his back to a chair and his face in shadow. The second glass of wine was swigged down like the first and looking with open eyes at John, he said:

‘I killed her.'

‘What? You did what?'

‘I killed her,' Mark said. ‘I killed Cherry.'

FERGUS CAMERON WAS
glad it was all over. He could never attend a Sports Day at Rossingham without remembering that terrible Sports Day in 1953, a week after the Coronation, when he had been beaten in the putting the shot event by a rank outsider from Churchill. Everyone knew he would win, he had no rivals, yet here quite suddenly was this newcomer from a new house – Churchill was then only four years old – and as soon as the shot flew from his hand Fergus
knew it was all up with him. Strange how it still rankled after more than thirty years. Hobhouse, the Churchill man's name had been, but his boys didn't come here, he wouldn't be here.

Fergus remembered how he had congratulated Hobhouse and with his heart full of bitterness and rage, held out his hand and grinned while an inner voice whispered to him that it was winning and losing which mattered and to hell with playing the game. A lot of water had flowed under Rostock, Alexandra, St Stephen's and Randolph since then.

‘I pity that one's son,' he whispered to Lucy, indicating an amazing woman who looked like a magazine cover with purposely tangled stripy hair and a dress that was a knitted tube of emerald green with an armour-plated belt round the middle.